These angles on athleticism—sports as war and sports as character-building—create a familiar binary that makes up much of how we think about sports mythology. One looks to athletics for a combative origin as a sign of human’s survival instinct, and the other as a moral tool by which people grow up. But both miss the mark.

I saw my first WNBA game in the summer of 1997 at The Forum in Inglewood. My family drove from Bakersfield to see the Los Angeles Sparks in our Dodge Caravan with dual sliding doors and a trademarked color only a seventh grader could remember: teal-island-satin glow.